Archives

Setting up a new machine and going through the Windows Update Dance as I install the various updates that are available now (Windows 7 has been out for almost 3 months now and you know). And of course once I've installed the required updates, it's always nice to see what's in the Optional list. However, I'd like when I'm done installing everything I intend to install for Microsoft Update (note that like 99.9% of Windows users, I installed Microsoft Update because there's no reason not to let Office, et al, get updates as well), I don't want the Update application to think there are more/new updates available. However, some of these optional updates I don't think I'm ever going … more

I picked up Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds earlier this year, and finally managed to finish it. It comes highly recommended by many excellent presenters, and there are quite a number of positive reviews of it on Amazon. Naturally some of them refer to the PresentationZen blog, which if you haven’t read you may wish to check out (there’s a great Hans Rosling post and recent TED-India video at the moment – I’m a huge Hans Rosling fan and so is Garr). I wonder if I can integrate Gapminder’s presentation of statistics along with some interesting data in some kind of developer talk. I’m not sure where I’d find the data, but that would be pretty cool, I think. But … more

The call for speakers for DEVLINK 2010 is now open. They are opening the call earlier this year to allow everyone ample time to consider the best session ideas. If you don't know about the devLink Technical Conference, please visit the website (www.devlink.net). The conference will take place August 5 - 7, 2010 in Nashville, TN, and had over 675 people at the event in 2009 from across the United States and some international presence as well. Please feel free to forward this note to others who might be interested in presenting. You can also direct them to the website where the official announcement and link to the application are available. Download Speaker … more

Now that computers with 64-bit operating systems and 8 or 12 GB of RAM are pretty affordable, there are some fairly easy things you can do to speed up your build time for large project. Jeffrey Palermo wrote about six months ago about a few options for using RAM drives to speed up builds, and at the time my primary laptop only had 3GB of RAM so I wasn’t able to take advantage of his advice. However, recently I’ve gotten a new laptop and maxed it out with 8GB of RAM and Windows 7 64-bit. Like Jeffrey, I have a ClickToBuild.bat file that will run my build as well as run all of the unit and integration tests for a given project. I set up a 1GB RAMDisk using Dataram RAMDisk … more

If you’re doing any work with WCF (and perhaps Silverlight, for example, but any client will do) and you’d like to maximize the performance of your messages, you’re probably using binary encoding as it’s much less verbose than other options. However, this makes tools like Fiddler much less useful when it comes to debugging why the thing isn’t doing what you thought it was doing, because by default Fiddler doesn’t have a useful view of such messages. Well, look no further. There is a WCF Binary-encoded Message Inspector for Fiddler which solves this need. It’s free and hosted on code.msdn.microsoft.com. You can read more about it on the Functional Fun blog. more

I love Windows 7. I’m using it now on my new primary laptop computer, and going through pictures getting ready for the holidays. And of course, a few of them need cropped, or red eye fixed, etc. Simple things that Vista included in the Windows Photo Viewer that was one of the things I loved about Vista vs. XP (yes, there were things improved in Vista over XP). But wait, where’d the “Fix” option go? Eh? Well it turns out Microsoft has pulled the functionality from the built-in Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 7 and moved it to the Windows Live Photo Gallery application. You can download the Windows Live Photo Gallery at http://download.live.com/photogallery … more

I’m very pleased to see Microsoft respond to customer feedback requesting a little bit more time before the release of Visual Studio 2010. There has been concern with the current beta release that its performance is not where it needs to be, especially in certain specific scenarios. Microsoft is aware of these issues and has a number of fixes under way or already checked in, but the concern among the community was that there wouldn’t be time for another broad beta or RC release of Visual Studio where any remaining issues could be reported back and corrected prior to release. Changing a launch date for something like Visual Studio is a big deal. There are partners and … more

Those of you who follow my blog (both of you) may have noticed an absence of posts of late. The reason for the lapse was simple: Michelle and I were in the process of selling two of our business properties, Lake Quincy Media and ASPAlliance.com, to The Code Project. It’s been almost a month since we announced the acquisition at PDC, so this isn’t exactly news, but if you want the full story, check out this press release: Lake Quincy Media Joins The Code Project to Deliver Unprecedented Developer Market Reach. I’ve also joined The Code Project team as a Senior Architect. I’ll be working remotely from Ohio, but visiting the company office in Toronto periodically. I’ll … more